Obama comes to bat

We were all so eager for Barack Obama to succeed. Especially the Republicans. Yes, it is true. They say so.

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In his acceptance speech on Thursday, Mitt Romney was positively giddy about the Obama of 2008. You would have thought he once had an Obama yard sign stuck in the lawn in front of his home — one of his homes, anyway.

“Four years ago, I know that many Americans felt a fresh excitement about the possibilities of a new president,” Romney said. “Americans were eager to go back to work, to live our lives the way Americans always have — optimistic and positive and confident in the future.”

Some, of course, did not get with the program. Some forgot that their goal was supposed to be an eagerness to get back to work and live their lives in optimism, confidence and positivity.

The top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, seemed to have a different agenda. “The single most important thing we want to achieve,” he said, “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

This was not the Romney agenda. And I am sure that Romney wrote a sharply worded e-mail to McConnell telling him to replace obstruction with assistance. (Though that email might have ended up in McConnell’s spam folder; it happens.)

But Romney has come to regret his wild enthusiasm for Obama. “Today, four years from the excitement of the last election, for the first time, the majority of Americans now doubt that our children will have a better future,” Romney said in Tampa.

Actually, this is not true. Actually, this is a massive misstatement of fact, which means it is virtually guaranteed to be repeated in every Romney speech from now until Election Day.

As Doyle McManus recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times, Americans have been pessimistic about the future for the past 28 years.

McManus quotes Samuel L. Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego, as saying: “From 1984 until now, a plurality on almost every survey — and sometimes a majority — has said the next generation would have it worse than this generation.”

Popkin, who devised the “worse off” question for the CBS/New York Times poll, noted that, “In October 1984, during the recession of the first Ronald Reagan administration, a whopping 63 percent said they thought the next generation would be worse off.

“The number improved briefly in the early 1990s; soared again to 58 percent in March 1995, during Bill Clinton’s tumultuous first term; eased during the boom of the late 1990s; and soared again under George W. Bush.”

Wait, this is impossible. Americans felt worse off during the eight years of George W. Bush, our last Republican president, our last Republican steward of the economy?